More Freedom per Dollar

So very dull, so costly, so difficult to reform! I am describing the American educational apparatus, from kindergarten through graduate school. Yet some able and influential people are nowadays bringing forward certain hopeful schemes for educational renewal. One has to do with the “voucher plan” for freedom of choice at the primary and secondary levels. The other is concerned with the ruinous cost of higher education, but also is related to freedom of choice.

In Michigan last November, a “voucher plan” was on the state ballot; it was badly defeated, chiefly through the power of the vituperative teachers’ unions. But the concept of “entitlements” or “vouchers” is not going to die. The case for this plan is put dispassionately and systematically by John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman in their new book Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (University of California Press, $10.95). For those readers who desire reminding, a voucher or entitlement plan provides that public funds for schooling should be distributed through certificates supplied to the parents of schoolchildren. These vouchers would be redeemable in public funds by the school of the parents’ choice.

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Russell Kirk

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So very dull, so costly, so difficult to reform! I am describing the American educational apparatus, from kindergarten through graduate school. Yet some able and influential people are nowadays bringing forward certain hopeful schemes for educational renewal. One has to do with the “voucher plan” for freedom of choice at the primary and secondary levels. The other is concerned with the ruinous cost of higher education, but also is related to freedom of choice.

In Michigan last November, a “voucher plan” was on the state ballot; it was badly defeated, chiefly through the power of the vituperative teachers’ unions. But the concept of “entitlements” or “vouchers” is not going to die. The case for this plan is put dispassionately and systematically by John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman in their new book Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (University of California Press, $10.95). For those readers who desire reminding, a voucher or entitlement plan provides that public funds for schooling should be distributed through certificates supplied to the parents of schoolchildren. These vouchers would be redeemable in public funds by the school of the parents’ choice.